Opening reception for “Ricardo Valverde: Experimental Sights, 1971-1996”

The late Los Angeles-based photographer and artist Ricardo Valverde (1946-1998) will be featured in a career retrospective at VPAM. The exhibition is guest-curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, CSRC visiting scholar and former chief curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA), and highlights more than one hundred artworks spanning a twenty-five-year period of production.

Ricardo Valverde: Experimental Sights, 1971-1996, includes works in a wide range of media, from black-and-white and color photographs, to solarized and intervened gelatin silver prints, to painterly collages that incorporate photographs and are mounted on canvas. The exhibition includes several videos; slide projections from Valverde’s photographs of lowriders, Day of the Dead celebrations, commercial signage; a light box with experimental slides treated as sculptural objects; and ceramic sculptures that resonate with his photography.

VPAM’s exhibition is the first survey of Valverde’s extensive body of work, and it is undertaken in partnership with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, which recently published Ricardo Valverde, a new monograph by Ramón García in the award-winning A Ver: Revisioning Art History series.

Ricardo Valverde by Ramón García is available for purchase: www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ricardo-valverde

IMAGE: Ricardo Valverde, Boulevard Night, 1979/1991,
Gelatin silver print, hand applied pigment, 11×14 inches, Esperanza Valverde and Christopher J. Valverde Collection